HARDWARE:  ELSA Gladiac GeForce2 GTS
5/05/2000
Retail: $349.99
Company: ELSA
Reviewed by Duane Pemberton

A couple of days ago we took at look at a reference card from nVIDIA based on final silicon of the newly announced GeForce 2 GTS GPU, and were quite pleased with the results we found.  Today we got the latest from ELSA called the “Gladiac” which is the first card to hit the market using this new chip.  ELSA has been long known for giving us some of the more stable cards around as well as making nice driver tweaks that typically bring out the most in their products.

The Gladiac is equipped with 32MB of DDR memory and has the standard VGA out on the back.  We’ve been told by a spokeswoman from ELSA that they should have the Revelator adapter for order on their website within a week or so.  For those of you who aren’t in the know, the Revelator glasses are ELSA’s 3D glasses, which integrate with their video cards to bring you full 3D gameplay.

Like the reference card, the Gladiac garners the most robust features found in any video card today.

• Graphics controller: NVIDIA GeForce GTS
• RAMDAC/Pixel Cycle: 350MHz
• Memory: 32MB or 64MB DDR RAM
• Bus System: AGP 2x/4x including fast writes and execute mode
• Standards: DPMS, DDC2B, Plug and Play
• Optional Video Module: 1x Video-In and 1x Video-Out
• BIOS: VESA BIOS 3.0 support
• 2D Features: 256 bit 2D acceleration, optimized for 32, 24, 16, 15, and 8 bit color, hardware cursor in true color, multi-buffering
• 3D Features: 256 bit engine with HyperTexel support, optimized Direct3D and OpenGL acceleration, full DirectX 7 support, 32 bit Z/stencil buffer, single pass multi-texturing, anti-aliasing, high quality texture filtering, advanced Per-Pixel texturing, and texture compression.

• What is Included
  ELSA GLADIAC gaming accelerator board
  Installation CD ROM with on-line users manual
  Hard-copy installation manual
  Software drivers for Windows 95 and 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, and Linux
  Windows utilities including ELSA Winman Suite and ELSA Advanced Settings
  6 year service warranty
  Optional GLADIAC video-in and video-out module available on www.shopelsa.com
• ELSA Software
  ELSA SmartRefresh: Select virtually any refresh rate for your monitor. ELSA SmartRefresh allows you to set the refresh rate to the maximum that your monitor can support for an absolutely flicker free picture
  Elsa SmartResolution: Set your desktop to the highest resolution - horizontally in 32, vertically in 1-pixel steps.